Peter Leonard, Almaty, Kazakhstan
– Kazakhstan's failure to improve media freedom has damaged its international
standing and the situation is getting worse, not better, a media advocacy
group said in a report Tuesday.

The New York-based Committee
to Protect Journalists said that restrictions on the press have tightened
even though Kazakhstan assumed the chairmanship of a prominent trans-Atlantic
security and rights organization earlier this year.

Kazakhstan won the right
to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe amid pledges
that it would grant more freedom to the media.

"Not only did the government
renege on promises to decriminalize libel, President Nursultan Nazarbayev
signed into law a restrictive new measure governing the Internet," CPJ
said.

Criticism of the government
and the president in oil-rich Kazakhstan remains largely off-limits, while
most major media outlets are controlled by the state or the pro-government
Nur Otan party.

Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman
Askar Abdrakhmanov said the report was unjustified and that Kazakhstan
was open to discussion on freedom of the press. "We don't believe that
repeated criticism is constructive," he said.

CPJ said at least one journalist,
Ramazan Yesergepov, as well as a human rights activist, Yevgeny Zhovtis,
have been jailed in retaliation for their work over the past two years.

Muckraking weekly newspaper
Respublika has been subjected to a barrage of legal assaults, most notably
when it was ordered to pay a crippling $400,000 in damages to state-controlled
BTA Bank for allegedly provoking a run on its deposits. Authorities also
raided the newspaper's printing house and a confiscated an entire weekly
run.

CPJ also criticized Kazakh
authorities for their attempt to muzzle Internet content, blocking access
to several critical Web sites and popular blogging platform Livejournal.

Although Internet penetration
still remains fairly low in Kazakhstan at an estimated 15 percent of the
population, authorities clearly intend to restrict access to material critical
of the government, CPJ said.

"In addition to censoring
domestic content, the new and vaguely worded Internet law also allows for
the blocking of international Web sites if those are found in violation
of Kazakh law," the report said.

CPJ said politicized libel
suits have also become a favored method of silencing independent media
outlets. A court in January last year ordered Kazakh-language weekly Taszhargan
and one of its reporters to pay $20,000 to a member of parliament for slandering
him in an article about rising food prices. The court later increased the
damages tenfold.

Taszhargan publisher Yermurat
Bapi was subsequently jailed for five days for failing to pay the damages.

Despite widespread concerns
over Kazakhstan's reluctance to implement democratic reforms, OSCE members
have agreed for the former Soviet nation to host a summit later this year
bringing together the organization's heads of state.

"Independent journalists,
human rights defenders, and political dissidents see the summit as a public
relations tool for the Nazarbayev administration, one that would lend legitimacy
to his government and obscure its many human rights failures," CPJ said.

Abdrakhmanov said although
the agenda for the summit has not yet been finalized, the Kazakh government
believes all issues covered by the OSCE, which include media freedom, would
be discussed at the event.